


Where Airy Voices Lead

by antonomasia09



Category: Awaken the Stars Series - Jer Keene, The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Suicide Attempt, Crossover, Gen, Immortality, Khodī̂ Som Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25395544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antonomasia09/pseuds/antonomasia09
Summary: Khodī̂ wakes up after his suicide attempt in Iraq to find a mysterious woman in his room who shares his immortality and wants him to join her.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Khodī̂ Som
Comments: 12
Kudos: 22





	Where Airy Voices Lead

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to my beta reader alyyks for cheering me on, helping brainstorm, helping make everything hurt more, and coming up with the wording for a sentence I was stuck on for an hour in about five seconds flat. Also for suggesting that I both read Ashlesha and watch The Old Guard. :D

Khodī̂ wakes up. It’s a surprise and it’s not. He’d known it wouldn’t be easy; if it was, he would have died along with the rest of his team, like he should have. But he had hoped a headshot might do the trick, especially at point blank range.

With a groan, Khodī̂ starts pulling himself up. His head aches, the right side of his face is _throbbing_ , and he can taste his own blood in his mouth, in the back of his throat. He makes it as far as his knees before he hears a rustling noise and freezes.

He’s not alone. There’s a woman sitting in Khodī̂’s chair, her legs propped up on his desk, flipping through one of the ESPN magazines left behind by the room’s previous occupant and casually ignoring the drying pool of blood and the formerly-dead man on the floor.

Khodī̂ looks around frantically. His .44 is lying nearby where he dropped it after pulling the trigger, but surely nobody from the department would be stupid enough to leave a loaded weapon within his reach. And she _has_ to be from the department; he doesn’t recognize her and she’s not in uniform, and she didn’t call for a superior officer or for a medic, which means she expected him to be getting up again.

“Go ahead and shoot me if you want,” she says, not bothering to look up from the magazine.

Khodī̂ hesitates. It has to be a bluff. Or a trick. She’s got backup outside the room just waiting for him to move, and they’ll take him down the moment he tries to shoot her.

He goes for the gun anyway. Maybe her backup will succeed where he failed.

To his surprise, the pistol is heavy enough that he thinks the clip really is still in it, and partly full. He brings it around in a smooth motion and nails her between the eyes, then swings towards the door and waits for the operatives to come rushing in.

There’s no one. Not even servicemen coming running at the sound of gunfire.

Uneasy, Khodī̂ turns back to the woman, who’s dangling limp in his chair, a perfectly round bleeding hole in her forehead. The magazine has slipped from her fingers to land on the floor, pages splayed open like limbs, revealing a two-page spread featuring the Philadelphia Eagles. Wesley’s face beams up at him, before it gets obscured by red droplets. 

He grabs the magazine and sets it back on his desk, and then drags himself to his feet.

And then she twitches, and Khodī̂ jumps about a foot in the air and empties the rest of his clip into her body. He stands there once it clicks empty, breathing harshly and his hands want to shake but he’s had enough training to keep them steady.

Not just department. She’s obviously been dosed.

Khodī̂’s dad has never mentioned anyone matching her description, so she’s not one of the Original Twenty, and not someone he’s run into since. Must be a more recent hire, but that doesn’t explain what she’s doing here today of all days, or why she seems to have come alone.

He edges closer to her, cautious. There’s an M1911A1 at her waist — an older model, but still in use by the Navy and Special Forces. Khodī̂ eases it free and ejects the clip.

Empty. He really hopes that doesn’t mean that there’s a trail of bodies leading to his room.

A pat-down reveals a small knife but no other guns, and also no ID. He tosses the M1911A1 under his bed and tucks the knife into his boot.

He should probably get out of here. If he has to, he might be able to explain away the dead woman and his own injury as an altercation with an intruder on the base, but he still doesn’t know what she wanted with him, or why she didn’t just grab him while he was healing.

The Iraqi desert and its inhabitants are both hostile. Khodī̂ has plans and backup plans for escape, just in case, — his dad taught him well — but he lost a lot of blood, and feels a little dizzy and a lot vulnerable. If she knew how to get to him here, she might be able to find him even if he tries to hide. More importantly, she might be able to get to Rex and Ella, and Khodī̂ can’t allow that.

She twitches again, and Khodī̂ curses emphatically.

Bullets clink as they worm their way out of her body and fall to the floor as she sits up slowly. It’s already too late for him to get close enough to cut her throat, so he aims his empty gun at her and hopes she’ll assume that he reloaded it.

“Ow,” she says pointedly.

Khodī̂ refuses to apologize. “What did you expect?” he says.

“I didn’t think you’d shoot more than once,” she answers. “Guess I should have.”

“Who are you?”

She stretches out her shoulders and rolls her neck. There are holes in her black tank top, but underneath is smooth undamaged skin. “You can call me Andy,” she says. “And you?”

Khodī̂ frowns. “You don’t know?”

“Well, I can see your name tag, but I’d rather call you by your first name if you’ll tell me what it is.”

She has to be lying; the department knows exactly who Django Whetū and his sons are. Fine, though, Khodī̂ will play along. “I’m Khỏi Khôn đi Som,” he says.

“Suasdey, Khỏi Khôn đi Som,” she says, her pronunciation perfect, and presses her palms together in front of her chest.

“Um,” he says, surprised; he’s never met a European-looking person who was able to say his name on the first try, let alone recognize it as Cambodian and then greet him in Khmer. “Just Khodī̂ is fine.”

“Khodī̂, then,” she says.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

She smirks. “I was in the neighborhood.”

They’re on a military base in the middle of the desert, miles from the nearest town. There is no neighborhood.

“What do you want from me?”

She raises an eyebrow. “I would have thought your questions would have been more along the lines of, ‘why are neither of us dead?’ They usually are.”

Khodī̂ suppresses a shudder at the fact that she’s done this enough times that there’s a “usual.” How many children of dosed operatives share this particular talent, he wonders. How many has this woman snatched up?

“You can tell the department to fuck off,” he says. “And I think you’ll find that I can fight better than the rest of the kids you’ve taken.”

She looks confused and then offended. “I don’t kidnap children,” she says. “And I’m not with any department.”

Sure. “And you didn’t shoot everyone you encountered on your way in?”

“Shoot yes, kill no,” she says. “They’re unconscious, maybe have some holes in them, but they’re not dead.”

That...isn’t the answer he expected. But still. “What the fuck did you think was going to happen here?” he says. “That I’d just follow you blindly and let you use me however you want? I’m not an idiot, and I’m not a weapon.”

She leans forward. “You’re so sure that I want a soldier,” she says.

Khodī̂ looks her in the eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he says.

Her lips curl up, amused. “You’re not wrong. But don’t you at least want to know what I’m fighting for before you make up your mind?”

“Nope,” he says. If he wasn’t holding the gun, he’d cross his arms. “Don’t care.”

“Not even if I tell you it’s for the greater good?”

Khodī̂ can’t help his incredulous laugh at that. “I’m Special Forces,” he says. “I’ve been fighting for ‘the greater good’ for years, and let me tell you, I realized a long time ago that ‘the greater good’ just means whatever’s best for the people holding the purse strings.”

“You’re still here, though.”

“I stayed for my men,” Khodī̂ says, blunt. “Now they’re gone, and, well,” he eyes the stain on the floor where he’d been lying. “I’m done fighting.”

Her eyes soften. There’s empathy, but also understanding. She’s lost people too, he thinks, and it nearly broke her.

“I won’t force you into anything,” she says. “But I think you’ll find that things have changed for you now. People will find out about this, and they’ll look at you differently.”

Khodī̂ is part-Māori, part-Cambodian. People have been looking at him weirdly his whole life. “I think I’ll be fine,” he says.

“If the military knows what you can do, they’ll either lock you away or ship you off to a lab for dissection,” she says. She sounds genuinely concerned, which doesn’t make sense because the department knows about his family already, and if they decide they want to do more ETKC-51-related testing, they have plenty of other operatives to choose from.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” he says.

She looks like she wants to keep arguing, but doesn’t. Just nods, clearly unhappy, and stands slowly. He lowers the gun when it doesn’t look like she’s going to try to attack him. “Mind if I borrow a pen?” she says.

“Go ahead.”

She takes one and scribbles a number on the cover of the magazine she bled on. “If you change your mind,” she says. “This is how you can reach me.”

He contemplates tossing the magazine out the window, but that would be rude. He can do it after she leaves.

Might be better off burning or burying it anyway, if he wants to get rid of it without getting asked uncomfortable questions.

“Thanks,” he says, and steps to the side so that she can get past him.

She stops by the door, doesn’t open it. “Don’t you want to know how I found you?” she says.

He does want to know that; his location is supposed to be classified at the highest levels. And if he knows how she did it then maybe he can prevent her from doing it again, stop her and whoever she works for from finding him and his siblings. “What will it cost me?”

She thinks for a moment. “You answer one question honestly.”

It's a terrible deal. Khodī̂ holds military secrets, family secrets, personal secrets. But she just said that he has to answer one question, not that it has to be the specific question that she really wants an answer to, so he says, “Fine.”

“I dreamt about you,” she tells him. “I saw the building collapse around you and your men. I saw you try to save them. Watched the rescue team bring you here afterwards.”

Khodī̂ can’t breathe, overwhelmed by the memories of choking dust and broken bones and a hand desperately clutched in his as he tried to keep the blood inside his sergeant’s body.

He used to share dreams with his siblings. It hasn’t happened in years, not since he was deployed to Afghanistan, half a world away from them. But Andy isn’t his sister and she couldn’t have been nearby when the RPG hit; there were checkpoints everywhere in that city, and they wouldn’t have let anyone pass without a confirmed military or local ID.

“You did everything you could for them,” she says, but how can she have seen it? How does she know? “It’s not your fault.”

Kodhī̂ manages a breath but it’s more of a sob. He stumbles back a step, hits his bed, and sinks down onto it. Wants to bury his face in his hands and hide until he can control himself, but he still can’t trust her and isn’t going to take his eyes off her.

So he forces it all down, buries his emotions deep, and promises himself he can fall apart once she’s gone.

“A question for a question,” he says, and is surprised at how steady his voice is. “What did you want to know?”

She looks at him, at the blood drying in his hair and the .44 still clutched in his hand. “You really don’t have any questions for me about immortality?” she says.

“Not for you,” he says, and nearly winces.

She catches his slip immediately. “Not for me,” she says. “But for someone else?”

He clenches his jaw. If by some miracle she doesn’t already know about his family, then like hell is he going to put them on her radar.

“I answered one question for you,” he says. “That was the deal. It’s time for you to go now.”

“I’m not your enemy,” she tells him.

Khodī̂’s not sure. All he knows is that he needs to clean up the mess and then he’s going to call his dad and talk to him for a really long time.

When he doesn’t respond, she sighs and opens the door, slipping out into the hallway and then closing it behind her. Khodī̂ allows himself one long moment to just sit there and stare at nothing, letting numbness settle over him, and then he gets up and goes looking for paper towels.

***

Ten years later, Khodī̂ and his family are hiding from the government on a tiny island in the Philippines. Eric is alive, if missing a few pieces. Rex can’t stop pacing, worried sick over his boyfriend who’s gotten himself stuck in Malaysia and might not be able to reach them before they have to move on.

Django finishes up his call to Jason’s son, walks back along the beach slowly, and tosses the phone to Khodī̂.

“Are you sure?” Khodī̂ says. “We can do this on our own.”

“I’m sure,” Django says. “We need all the help we can get right now. And if they’re really not from the department, then they might be the best allies we can find.”

“Okay.” Khodī̂ punches in the number that he memorized instead of tossing away, and waits for the call to connect.

“Khodī̂?” Andy says.

He blows out a breath. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Burner phone,” she says. “You’re the only one I gave this number to.” 

She kept the burner with her all these years. Khodī̂ isn’t sure whether that’s confidence or arrogance, but right now he’s just grateful that he managed to get through.

“That, and I’ve been having some rough dreams lately,” she adds. Khodī̂ thinks about the Ho Chi Minh City airport and winces.

“That offer you made me in Iraq,” he says. “Is it still on the table?”

“Yes,” she says immediately.

“And if there are some people I want to bring with me?”

“You already knew an immortal,” she breathes. “You’ve found more of us?”

“Yeah, something like that,” he says, because explaining his family will take too much time. “Listen, we’re in Mapun,” he says. “We’re on the run from the American government. And we have a job for you.”


End file.
